The realities of deploying generative AI in customer support with Alia Azim, Citation Group

Picture of Kane Simms
Kane Simms

More ways to listen and watch

About this episode

Generative AI is changing how customer support chatbots are built, deployed and measured.

In this episode, we sit down with Alia Azim, Product Lead for Chatbots at Citation Group, to discuss the company’s shift from traditional NLU chatbots to generative AI conversational agents.

Alia brings a wealth of experience in conversational AI, including time spent at Lloyds Banking Group, and she gives us an honest account of what it actually looks like to move from NLU-based chatbots to generative AI in a real business environment.

Citation Group provides HR, compliance and business services for thousands of small and medium businesses. Supporting those customers means handling everything from platform troubleshooting to account access issues. Alia explains how their team rebuilt the chatbot strategy around generative AI, focusing on specific use cases, improved knowledge management, and outcomes that actually resolve customer problems.

We explore the limitations of traditional intent-based bots, why generative AI dramatically changes how conversational systems are designed and why success metrics like containment are being replaced by resolution rate.

We also get into the debate around whether conversation design is dead. Designers and engineers still play a critical role, but the work now focuses less on building rigid flows and more on shaping AI behaviour through guidance, knowledge design and customer journey thinking.

Show notes

Follow Alia on LinkedIn
Follow Kane Simms on LinkedIn

Download our exclusive report on how AI agents keep CX stable when volume explodes
Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment
Subscribe to VUX World
Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack

Share

Weekly newsletter

The latest in AI-powered customer experience. Make better strategic decisions with the help of our weekly newsletter.

Host

Kane Simms

A strategic AI advisor who, for the past decade, has helped business leaders and product owners transform customer experience using conversational and generative AI.

Share

✓   Link copied

Weekly newsletter

The latest in AI-powered customer experience. Make better strategic decisions with the help of our weekly newsletter.

Top articles and podcasts

Related content

The best AI use cases are right in front of your eyes

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player… CCW published a report recently that asked contact centre leaders how much impact AI has had on

How to build reliable AI agents: Test Driven Development is back!

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player… One of the top questions on the lips of teams building AI agents is ‘when is it

The two things contact centres have been missing until now
Cresta CEO Ping Wu unpacks the two things contact centres have always lacked, and how AI changes that.
Our deep analysis of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI Platforms 2026
Discover where all 14 vendors landed, why voice is only an optional criterion and the question the report doesn't ask.

Meet VUX at CCW Europe, Amsterdam, October 5-7

Register now: Why your contact centre playbook is obsolete